More than one way to skin a kata (part II - Extracts)

This second part of the series on supplementary kata exercises is grounded in the idea of seeing each kata as if it was a book full of information. Why not taking small elements out of it and making them individual exercises?

I'm going to make some examples here taken directly from our style's kata, even tho I am aware that they won't make sense to anyone who doesn't know to what I am referring to exactly.

#1 - Stance transitions

In many ways, stances are the true foundations of good karate technique. While in sparring or fighting you are not moving around in formal stances, they are definitely going to be used as part of both attack and defense techniques. Perhaps without being fully aware of it, you often enter a stance as a reaction to the opponent's attack, and you also normally end your counterattack in a stance as well.

But it is already a very hard work to learn one single stance properly, and particularly frustrating when you notice that you have stopped thinking about proper stance for a while and you have now moved backwards instead of improving. With each stance being difficult to "nail", it clearly gets even harder to move from one to the other making sure that they are both correct, and that the transition between the two does not leave you dangerously without balance.

Every kata goes through many stance transitions, thus it provides a lot of excellent suggestions for practicing these: just choose one stance you feel particularly weak at, find it inside a kata you are familiar with, then take either the technique which leads to that chosen stance from a previous stance, or the technique that from that chosen stance leads to the next. You now have extracted a very short and simple exercise to repeat over an over with total focus on that stance transition.

A special case of this can be a "pivoting" exercise, where you take two or more stances that follow each other while one foot of yours remains in the same spot on the ground all the time. An example can be found in the three beginning moves of the Gekisai kata, where the left foot never lifts or shifts, only rotates in its spot, while the body goes through three different stances as it turns left, move forward and then backward.

Another interesting extract I've been practicing myself, is the fast consecutive forward-backward steps in shikodachi stance from the kata Seiyunchin. It is very difficult to walk on a straight line in this stance (in fact it is even pretty hard just standing still, it's the stance most demanding to your legs muscles!). This two-moves sequence from the kata seems to be truly useful if repeated on both sides while following a straight line painted on the floor to keep your direction of movement under check all the time.

#2 - Stance verification

A somewhat different idea compared to the previous, in this case I want to focus on a more specific challenge common to all stances, which is that of getting the right distance and angle between your feet.

There are some occurrences in kata where you have to turn a certain angle starting from a certain stance and ending into a mirror image of the same stance (i.e. same stance but done on the other side), without lifting or shifting your feet. An example with the sanchindachi stance is found in the kata Sepai which contains a swift turn 90 degrees in this stance, followed by a slow turn back. Another example is found in Shisochin kata, where there is a 135 degrees turn between two mirrored zenkutsudachi.

The point here is that when you are turning like that on the balls of your feet (i.e. without lifting nor shifting them) and both the starting and the ending stances should be correct, then if you didn't have just the right distance and angle between your feet in the starting stance, either the direction you're facing after the transition will be incorrect, or your ending stance will be very visibly wrong: the distance between the feet will still be right, but the ending stance will be too wide sideways and too short frontally, or otherwise too narrow sideways and too long frontally. By repeating the transition right and left, you can each time adjust your feet slightly until the ending stance looks and feels the same as the starting stance.

#3 - Kihon Ido and Kihon Kumite samples

As a continuation to the previous points, in a kata you can find slightly longer sequences of moving techniques that can be extracted and practiced individually as Kihon Ido or together with a training buddy as Kihon Kumite, with the latter taking inspiration from the bunkai or coming up with original ideas.

In particular, it might be useful to look for sequences containing unusual and rarely used techniques, that you normally never practice as such, and by extracting that sequence you can have a small exercise to dedicate some training time to that technique. This especially includes those which are so much based on subtle movements and footwork that cannot be practiced alone but only in the context of a sequence.

More than one way to skin a kata (part I - Geometry Unearthed)

Who would win on a fight, Chuck Norris or Euclid? Let's find out, but no worries, you don't need to undust your old calculus books for this.

As explained in the previous post, this article will be the first of a series on possible ways to study a kata beyond its basic, traditional form and its bunkai and other applications. The general purpose of these additional exercises is to shift our focus to different specific aspects or details of the kata we are currently studying, so that when we go back to performing the kata in the regular and correct way, we might have more confidence thanks to some extra insight gained.

The first group of ideas collected here is all about modifying the "geometry" of the chosen kata as a whole, start to finish. The techniques (stances, attacks, defenses) stay the same as in the normal form. Presumably you can practice all the following variations with your chosen degree of speed and power, but some of these variations might prove puzzling especially if you are actually already good at the regular performance of your current kata to the point of normally doing it almost automatically: hence you might want to always start as slow as possible.

#1 - Embusen

From my current understanding of the term, the "Embusen" of a kata is the imaginary shape that you trace on the ground as you move and turn around to perform the kata from start to finish. If you had a pocket full of flour sewn to your karate gi, with a hole in it so that the flour would slowly spill to the ground, at the end of the kata you might literally see the shape of the embusen written in flour on the floor.

The first idea is to completely ignore or "remove" all the upper-body techniques of the kata, and just perform the stances, the steps and the kicks. Basically your legs should be doing everything in the kata normally, while your arms should be doing nothing except relaxing in whatever comfortable position you prefer and perhaps help a bit with balance if needed.

The purpose of this variation is to allow you to check your stances more carefully and to improve your embusen in terms of correct distances and angles.

#2 - No embusen

The second idea is the opposite of the previous.

This time we stand in a relaxed practice position with parallel feet at shoulder width (heikodachi) and perform only upper-body techniques of the kata, always remaining in the same spot with feet neither turning nor lifting.

There are a couple of non-obvious things to keep in mind while doing so:

- While your feet stand still on the ground all the time, your torso also remains forward-facing but your head should instead turn around to follow the direction of each technique properly: for example, if there is a block or attack towards your left side but with your body facing forward (as in the first shikodachi technique of Gekisai dai Ichi kata) you should really look left and perform the technique towards the same side, but if the whole body would turn to the left before the technique (as in the first sanchindachi technique of the same kata) then you should still face forward. In other words, your body in this exercise always faces forward, and it is your head and arms which adapt to the direction required to maintain the same relative angle with the body.

- Even tho you are ignoring the leg techniques, you may still "hint" at them with hips movements. This way you can mentally follow the complete sequence of the kata almost as if you weren't skipping any move. (Alternatively, I suppose you can also perform the kicks if you want, but from the heikodachi stance it might not always be possible).

I am not sure what could be the purpose of this variation, but it does challenge you especially on the not so basic kata. The difficulty of this exercise lies exactly in the points above, particularly the first i.e. redirecting your upper-body techniques to keep their proper relative angle with the lower body which the latter is "blocked" facing forward and not allowed to change the stance.

#3 - Linearization / folding

This variation is based on a simple idea: folding the entire embusen of the kata into a straight line, so that you perform all the techniques of the sequence moving only either forward or backward, but without ever turning around (unless when a technique requires a 360 degrees turn).

Let me tell you this straight: it is not as easy as it sounds. You might need your teacher's help to figure out how to linearize certain moves. Generally speaking tho, the linearization should not require to change the stance or the attack/defense technique itself, but it will certainly require to change how to transition between different stances.

This idea can actually be seen as a preparatory or complementary exercise to learning the bunkai of the kata, at least the one-on-one version of it where you need to direct all the techniques towards an opponent in front of you.

#4 - Mirror image

I have to thank sensei Paul Walker (www.shotokansensei.com) for this idea, since I have learned about it from his instructional videos.

The idea is very simple: to perform an exact mirror image of the kata, where right becomes left and left becomes right.

Performing a mirrored kata is generally very disorienting, probably more if you are already pretty trained in doing it correctly at full speed. It forces you to think carefully about next move every time, hence you will very likely discover that you cannot do it at your best dynamics (power, rhythm, breathing) but that you have to go back to home base and do it very slowly, one step at a time, just like you did when you were completely new to the kata. You might also find that your embusen ends up a little "skewed" as a result, forcing you to be more careful on distancing and angles.

Quite clearly the main purpose of this exercise is in the concentration effort. Another possible benefit is that for an asymmetrical kata it allows to practice all techniques to the other side as well.

#5 - Reverse execution

Another idea from sensei Walker's instructional videos is to try and perform the entire sequence backward, from the last technique to the first.

This is possibly even more difficult than a mirror image, because in many cases the sequences of techniques don't even work or make sense anymore, but you should still strive to perform them in reverse order and remember that with all these complementary exercises the purpose is simply in the effort required, not in their usability or applicability to a real fight scenario.

Just to make it clear, when I say "backward" I mean the following:

- start the kata from the last technique, then the second-last and so on, and end the kata with what is normally the first technique
- do all footwork backward, so that a normally forward-moving attack becomes a backward-moving attack and a backward-moving defense becomes a forward-moving defense
- ideally at the end of the kata you should have traced the same embusen as usual on the ground, but from the end point back to the starting point
- on the other hand the techniques themselves are not backwards, you are not "rewinding" your movements like on a VCR! a strike is still a strike, not a punch or kick pulling back

Once again an obvious purpose of this variation is to practice your ability to concentrate, but this time there will be a lot of extra work needed to adapt all the techniques to a reversed footwork, so that they more or less look like a strike could still hit and a defense could still block or deflect. There will be a lot of thinking required, and this will certainly make for a different kind of exercise!